Climate change poses the biggest challenge to survival in the 21st century. Managing our urban areas well is central to any effort mounted to meet this challenge. Among all energy-intensive urban activities, mobility remains one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Managing urban mobility, therefore, offers a big opportunity for climate change mitigation. The two workshops seek to discuss the challenges and the way forward to address these issues.

Regional Workshop on ‘Bus transport: An agenda for reform to promote clean and low carbon mobility’

Buses provide the bulk of public transport services in Indian cities. Its share in daily travel in bigger cities can be as high as 40-60 per cent. Cities are looking at bus transport reforms as one of the significant strategy to reduce automobile dependence, congestion, and pollution. Bus sector reforms, fleet renewal and modernisation require significant improvement in operations, multi-modal integration and resource mobilisation. In order to do so, it is pertinent to set a whole new term of policy debate and seek solutions and share learning from emerging best practices to inform this action. The workshop on buses is part of CSE’s national programme to promote cross learning across cities to inform local policy action, and will aim to further this agenda. The workshop will be attended by Government officials, private practitioners, academicians and representatives of civil society from Kolkata and West Bengal who are directly and indirectly related to bus services in Kolkata and West Bengal.

The briefing will aim to apply the ongoing discourse on urban transport and climate change to the context of West Bengal and Kolkata in particular. The aim would also be to look at various opportunities that lie in this domain for the city and the state to engage with in their attempts towards climate change mitigation. The workshop seeks to build capacity among journalists from West Bengal in order to enhance their understanding of the issue. This will enable enlightened and analytical reportage on the subject.